The mobile analytics space continued to heat up last week as AdMob released a free tool allowing advertisers and publishers to track traffic and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based startup said the offering delivers site-performance metrics such as the number of unique visitors, duration of visits, page performance and user details including geography, operator and handset information. AdMob Mobile Analytics also provides visibility into sources of traffic, the company said, including search engines, direct traffic and advertising.
The service is in beta and is free for unlimited use, and can track ad campaigns carried out through competing ad networks as well as through AdMob’s partners.
“There’s no need for us to charge” for the service, AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui said. “On a selfish basis, it’s going to be good for us. And if we can help publishers and advertisers understand their campaigns and their sites, they’re going to have access to data that helps them make smarter decisions.”
Peering behind the curtain
Other players in the mobile analytics space include Amethon Solutions, Mobilytics, Tig Tags and Wapalizer; Bango, an off-deck transaction company, joined the field earlier this year with a free hosted analytics service.
Analysts say a lack of visibility into mobile advertising has played a major role in keeping the market from approaching the sky-high forecasts of analysts. A lack of traffic on the wireless Web coupled with “the lack of critical mass of educated advertisers able to measure return on investment will restrain mobile media’s potential in the midterm,” according to a report released earlier this year by JupiterResearch.
There is no shortage of reasons for the dearth of information about who uses the mobile Internet – and how they use it. Mobile phones generally don’t support Javascript or cookies, which have been crucial in tracking Internet usage on computers, and carriers are understandably unwilling to share demographic information with third parties. Also, behavior on the wireless Web doesn’t always mirror activity on the traditional Net. Users generally are less willing to leisurely browse the Internet on their phones, instead opting to fire up the browser to quickly check e-mail or get sports scores before ending the session.
Back to the future
But another important factor is timing, according to Dean Collins, who oversees U.S. business development for Amethon, an Australian firm. While there are plenty of lessons to be learned from the early days of the Internet, there aren’t many online veterans around to apply them.
“The problem is the gap between 1994 and 2008; it’s too long,” Collins said. “Everybody who lived through building Web sites in 1994, and all the issues developers had around things like screen resolution, what works and what doesn’t, they’ve all moved on to other things. Now we have these new guys who have no idea that you can screw up so badly” in building sites for mobile phones.
Mobile advertising firms have developed their own systems for tracking activity on their ad networks, but those solutions offer only a sliver of insight to the broader wireless Web. Several recent initiatives hope to provide a more expansive view, however: Five European carriers have formed a working group to develop common measurement standards for wireless marketing campaigns, and the Mobile Marketing Association has begun working to establish guidelines for measuring the effectiveness of mobile ads.
Those efforts could be key in spurring a U.S. wireless advertising market that still has yet to gain mass-market attention. Only 15% of responding ad executives in a Screen Digest study said they had used mobile advertising, according to a report last week from eMarketer.com, and a recent iMedia poll found that 60% of executives surveyed said they wouldn’t put “a large portion” of their 2008 online budgets into mobile.
“There remain clear growing pains ahead for mobile advertising,” eMarketer analyst John du Pre Gauntt noted. “There are sticky disagreements concerning mobile customer information among mobile operators, Web portals, brands and agencies.”
More transparency needed
And working through those growing pains will require more information than just behavior patterns on the wireless Web, Collins predicted. Just as the industry must do a better job of monitoring traffic and determining the effectiveness of ad campaigns, it must find a way to create more transparency across competing mobile-ad companies.
“The question is, if I’m an AdMob user, a Third Screen user, how do I get all those guys to talk to each other?” Collins asked. “That’s not just analytics. It’s what’s the CPM? What’s the click-through rate?”
